omg on ET they showed alot of clips from the yards! i had never seen anything from it yet so i was really excited when it came on! if u can still catch ET or watch it when it's on later tonight i definately recommend it! the movie looks like it's going to be so good! mark has a really thick new york accent in it and lemme tell u ... he looks so sexy and BUFF! hehe i read somewhere he took off his shirt to film some scenes for the movie ... ahhh can't wait for it to come out!!

Hey, thanks for letting us know! I usually don't watch ET but was able to catch the repeat broadcast. Those clips look GOOD! And Mark's accent, wow. Looking back over his film career I think his command of speech has improved so immensely. I finally saw Renaissance Man and I noticed that in the beginning he started out speaking with a Southern accent (and his character was supposed to be from down South) but then it kind of disappeared, and in Travellers wasn't clear what kind of accent he was doing. In Boogie Nights, The Corruptor, the Bit Hit and Three Kings, he didn't really have any discernible accent ... and now he's doing Noo Yawk for The Yards and, I understand, a c*ckney (working-class Brit) accent for parts of Metal God. And of course for The Perfect Storm he's reverting back to the Dorchester accent that he worked hard to lose.

"Tiger-Tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night..."
Thanks for the info!! That reminds me, I'd better see when ET This Week is on for sure and set my tape up for it, just in case!
Cathy, I think on the non-accent roles, he was usually supposed to be from up North. I forget which states, but I know I have seen 'em mentioned for The Travellers and Three Kings. Boogie Nights was in Cali, so I don't know, do Cali folks HAVE accents?
The NY one doesn't surprise me, as it is the northeast anyhow. But the Brit one now... Mmmmmmm-boy, I am going to fracture when I hear that one!! Holy Cats and MEOW, Batman!
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Annie M

The New York accent is VERY different from the Massachusetts accent, even though they're both northeast. In the non-accent roles, Mark's characters are indeed supposed to be from places that don't have a distinct accent -- California, and the generic, non-working-class, Northeast accent. (You know, the sort of generic "American" pronunciation that is used by TV news people, etc.) In TK, Troy Barlow is supposed to be from Detroit, right? I've spent some time in Detroit and I don't think there's any real distinct regional accent, either.

I think he had an accent in "Traveller" but I couldn't quite tell what it was, maybe just a less pronounced version of the Dorchester accent which was pretty heavy in "Fear." It kinda cracked me up because I know a few people in Massachusetts who actually speak like that. Before I got used to it, I remember one time when I was being given directions and it took me a while to figure out that the guy was saying "Park Street."

By the way, I'm sure you know this, but just in case, the c*ckney accent is not what we think of as the British accent, I mean not like Hugh Grant. It's more like, if you remember "My Fair Lady," the way Eliza Doolittle talks before she gets speech lessons from the professor. You know, where you drop all the H's at the beginning of words so that "home" sounds like "ome," and prounounce "a" like "i" -- i.e. "ace" sounds like "ice," "take" sounds like "tyke," etc.